With all in-region long-distance approvals under its belt, SBC Communications Inc. expects to deliver hosted VoIP services to businesses across the country by the end of this year.
The new, nationwide hosted VoIP business product — which effectively replaces the more limited IP Centrex SBC has been selling the past few years on a by-request basis — is now available in select markets and will be in cities nationwide by the end of 2004.
SBC PremierSERV Hosted IP Communication Service (HIPCS) integrates customized applications, as well as the traditional functionality of business voice-only systems, through a Web browser-based interface. Based on Sylantro technology, service features include unified messaging, through which voice mail and e-mail can be consolidated in a single inbox, and voice mail can be forwarded like e-mail; find me-follow me, which enables employees to forward calls to a mobile phone, remote office, another extension or elsewhere; click to call; and conferencing.
Initially, the service will run over gateways in Level 3 Communications’ network, Marianne Gedeon, SBC’s director of voice data convergence, tells xchange. She says SBC doesn’t consider HIPCS to be a Level 3 service that SBC is reselling, because SBC is handling the billing services, the transport piece and other management of the service. SBC’s plan is to eventually deploy its own gateways, from equipment supplier Siemens, to support HIPCS, she says.
“We’re seeing a real shift in the voice market,” says Gedeon. “Basically the market is moving more and more from traditional voice and Centrex to IP PBX or hosted solutions. We see where the trends are going, and we see that’s what the customer wants. That’s why we opted to contract with Level 3 now. The plan is to eventually phase that out and go with our own infrastructure. But the customer won’t notice any difference [when that happens]; Level 3 also uses Sylantro, so there will be no noticeable customer change.”
Tom Valovic, program director for IP telephony at research firm IDC, says SBC “has definitely been the most aggressive [RBOC] with respect to hosted voice.”
Several years ago, SBC began offering IP Centrex services, but those have been sold “on a very limited basis,” Gedeon tells xchange. “We are not looking to move forward with Centrex IP; we have put that on a sales hold,” she says, explaining those IP Centrex services had to be deployed on a central office-by-central office basis, “and there is a fair capex associated with that.” Gedeon declined to quantify the customer takeup of SBC’s previous IP Centrex service, but says “it was very limited.”
HIPCS, meanwhile, will be available nationwide and is based on a media gateway configuration out of a data center, which can deliver the service to an entire LATA, says Gedeon. “Customers didn’t want different solutions and vendors across the enterprise, so this is better suited to our customers,” she says.
The new service is also feature-rich, with point-and-click Web portal functionality, says Gedeon. Also, under HIPCS, any SBC-hosted VoIP customers are considered “on-net,” so any calls between those customers on the network — whether those calls are between individuals that work for one business or between employees at different companies — are delivered at no additional charge.
A standard HIPCS plan offers a flat rate for calls within regional calling areas. SBC has divided states into quadrants based on the specific areas businesses typically call. In this package, off-net calls are charged by the minute.
Basic regional plans sell for as low as $29 per connected CPE station, per month, for five-year contracts, says Gedeon. A national HIPCS calling plan offers unlimited on-net and off-net calling. National plans can sell for as low as $39 per station per month.
Customers of HIPCS need an Internet connection and may have to do some LAN or WAN upgrades (SBC will assess the need) and invest in CPE, which can be as low as $200 per port in the case of the analog phone adapters from Sylantro. Customer premises equipment options for HIPCS also include physical IP phones from Cisco and Polycom. There are four service feature packages available.
